GamePolitics reports WotC initially contacted Sunstone Games in December to complain that its “Kaiju Combat” video game infringed on WotC’s trademark “Kaijudo,” a trading card game that’s also an animated series.

All was quiet after that exchange, GamePolitics continues, until Wednesday when WotC emailed Kickstarter to suspend the “Kaiju Combat” campaign for infringing on intellectual property. Kickstarter complied and informed backers as well as Sunstone owner Simon Strange.

“Kaiju Combat – Giant Monsters. Awesome Fighting. Online. is the subject of an intellectual property dispute and is currently unavailable,” its Kickstarter now says.

I reached out to WotC, Strange and Frank for a comment. Strange emailed this response:

WotC Counsel contacted me back in December, complaining that “Kaiju Combat” represented an infringement of their trademark KAIJUDO. I’ve heard nothing from them since then, until March 20 – when they sent an e-mail to Kickstarter, asking that the Kickstarter pages be taken down.

Kickstarter did so, and sent out a notice to all the backers of both campaigns. Kickstarter also passed the original e-mail along to me.

I understand how trademark issues work – if you take out a trademark you need to be proactive about protecting it, or you run the risk of losing it. So I initially interpreted the message as a lawyer being thorough and covering their client’s trademark. Obnoxious, but not something I needed to get upset about or talk about in public.

But when Kickstarter sent out those e-mails, I got literally 100s of frantic questions from backers / people on the forums / etc asking about the status of the game. That sort of crossed the line from “unfortunate legal hurdles” to “actual development impediment.” And so this time around I put out some public statements about the situation.

I doubt any of the real people working on Kaijudo are specifically threatened by Kaiju Combat – they’re probably fans of the project, in fact! This isn’t a situation where money is going to change hands, or we’ll lose rights to the game, or anything significant like that. We just need to set a legal precedent for the extent to which WotC’s KAIJUDO trademark prevents other companies from making games with “Kaiju” in the title.

But clearly this has taken a bit of a negative turn, and that’s really unfortunate for everyone. Obviously we can’t afford to spend our very limited development budget, which was provided by our backers on Kickstarter, on fighting over a name. But at the same time it would really make me sad if we’re forced to change our name just because we can’t afford to defend ourselves. I’m still hopeful that it won’t come to that. I’m actually going to be at GDC with Richard Garfield next week – maybe I’ll be able to get his take on the situation?

As for what this means for the monster designs, which are collaborations between Frank, Strange and Kickstarter backers, Strange says “it won’t impact those characters or designs at all. The case is entirely about the product name, and not about any of the work we have put into the project thus far.”

I didn’t hear from WotC or Frank before posting this story but I’ll update it should they respond.